What’s the best way to create a long shadow effect?

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Q&A, by Mark White

April 6, 2017

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Long shadows are very common on the internet right now, and they’re a simple way to brighten up your text or icons for use on the web. Though the layer styles that Elements offers can create great drop shadows for all kinds of projects, they don’t offer anything as long as this; luckily, it’s easy to create the effect using the Polygonal Lasso.

Create your text on a background and zoom in to the first letter, in our case, the ‘G’. Click on the top right of the letter with the Polygonal Lasso, and holding Shi􏰀, click off to the bottom right of the page to create a perfectly straight line. Join up the Polygonal Lasso at the bottom le􏰀 of the letter. Create a new layer beneath the text layer and fill this with a colour.

Do this for every single letter on separate layers. To create the effect that we have, with each of the letters’ drop shadows overlapping each other, lower the Opacity of each drop shadow to around 30-40%. Instead of filling in with block colour, you can also fill with a gradient; experiment to see what will look best.